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- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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BREXIT Broke My Heart: The Moment that the Milk of Human Kindness Went Sour and Lumpy
Illustration: Matt Kenyon via The Guardian
I am from Coventry, The City of Peace, Forgiveness and Reconciliation.
Thus, how can I not be at a loss with and flabbergasted by Brexit?
'Healing the wounds of history, learning to live with difference and celebrate diversity,
and building a culture of peace and justice in the interest of the common good'
This is the Europe that Coventry Story encourages us to believe in
Eurosceptics should visit Coventry Cathedral: The EU's Higher Purpose
And
EU has always been a Peace Project First and Foremost
Having failed to encourage my fellow-citizens to vote to remain in the European Union in the referendum which had been my resolution for 2016, 2017, 2018 2019 and 2020, what could be easier than succeeding in making my country a better place?
EU Referendum: An Open Letter to British people - One man's view of Britain and the British
BREXIT: When England Betrayed Churchill
So, They Got Their Brexit Done!
Throughout history Britain’s ruling class has created crisis after crisis – just like now
Watch and hear George Monbiot explaining the historical falsehood and lies behind the Brexit Project
And thus, the Time is Now for my ‘64,000 QUESTION’: How Can We Leave This Gigantic Failure Behind and Restart a Better Future?
The Bedrock of our Hope in 2021 and beyond must be Values-led Education and Learning from our Wisest Teacher, Mother Nature
I need to do something after my defeat over Brexit. Thus, I am unleashing my inner edu/ and ecowarriors, so that tragic events such as Brexit are less likely in future.
BREXIT: The Day Common Sense Died In England
Brexit: ‘An English tragedy, a self-inflicted wound, English, not British.’
...there is “absolutely nothing good about Brexit … which would never have happened had Conservative politicians not,
to a quite unprecedented degree, deceived and lied to their people”.
Britain 'taken over by gamblers, liars, clowns and their cheerleaders'
‘The charge sheet is this. The government is led by a clique of toffs who have neither respect for their colleagues, nor empathy with the average voter. Their born-to-rule mentality means they have a greatly over-inflated view of their own capabilities, which deafens their ears to the advice and warnings of others who might actually know better. They are nothing like as good at governing as they think they are. And this, the charge sheet concludes, is now inflicting serious harm on both the country and the Conservatives' future electoral prospects...’- Andrew Rawnsley
Our Narcissistic and Egoistic Elites Undermining the Common Good
There are, for sure, many reasons such as the inhumane neoliberalism/austerity, abject poverty and inequality, to name but a few, for the recent rises in populism, Brexit, and other undesirable similar things. But, for me, two reasons stand up above others:
1- The failure of education to be led by good, ethical, moral and spiritual values, and thus, it’s inability to be a path to wisdom.
2- Our failure to be connected with mother nature, to protect her and in turn be nourished and inspired by her.
To my mind, these two failures have given us a life devoid of any imagination, beauty and wisdom to see life’s bigger picture.
These tragic failures are very costly and have major destructive consequences, where one easily becomes brainwashed, separated from one's reality and humanity, and in turn becomes self- centered, selfish, individualistic, arrogant, discarding of others, disliking cooperation and belonging to a wider community, believing in one’s self-importance and exceptionalism and thus choosing isolationism, burning bridges and building walls and barriers.
In such a life, one becomes easy prey, a gullible individual to be exploited by the alchemist buffoons, dancing to their tunes and becoming totally subservient to their whims, cheats, lies and unrealistic promises.
Given the above, the fundamental and pertinent questions must surely be: How is it that the gullible masses, time and again, vote against their own self enlightened interest, and thus how can they be saved from their own self-destruction?
The answer is very easy to grasp if one is wise enough to know where to find it!
The First Step is to Find the Light, so that We Can Get Out of Darkness and Hopelessness of our own making.
That Light is EDUCATION, but not any EDUCATION and for sure not the current ‘thingy’ masquerading as Education.
The Second Step is to rediscover the Healing and Spiritual Powers of Nature and then allowing Mother Nature to become our trusted Friend and Teacher.
I will be devoting most of my time writing about these in 2021 and beyond. For now, I very much wish to share a few postings from our GCGI archive as examples of what I have in mind:
Britain today and the Bankruptcy of Ideas, Vision, Spirit and Values-less Education
At a time of profound crises there must be an opportunity for new vision, new understanding and new thinking. There is a desperate need for new practical ways of relating in an increasingly interdependent global community: a time to re-introduce spirituality, ethics, civility, kindness, humanity and the common good into the debate on globalisation, economics, politics, business, education, international relations and much more.
Surely the time is now to rise and challenge the falsehood and the inhumanity of the ideology that since the early 1980s has cheated and humiliated us by monetising all aspects of our lives, and has stopped us from knowing what it means to be human:
But, the Challenge Is: How to Make Our Country a Better Place?
Replace the delusional and destructive neoliberal education with inspirational values-led Education
The Value of Values: Values-led Education to Make the World Great Again
Brexit, Trump and the failure of our universities to pursue wisdom
To All Striking Academic Colleagues in Britain: Turn the Strike to a Force for the Common Good
The Journey to Sophia: Education for Wisdom
What if Universities Taught KINDNESS?
Wisdom and the Well-Rounded Life: What Is a University?
Throw away the fake neoliberal ‘teachers’ and let nature to be our wisest Teacher
On the 250th Birthday of William Wordsworth Let Nature be our Wisest Teacher
Why should we all become mother nature and sacred earth guardians
To Heal the World and People We Need to Save the Commons from Plunder
And finally, I hope you will consider joining me, so that together we can explore how we may make our country good and better.
Let us Come Together and Become the Voices of Hope
Photo:twr.org
The Days to Come
‘Now shall I store my soul with silent beauty,
Beauty of drifting clouds and mountain heights,
Beauty of sun-splashed hills and shadowed forests,
Beauty of dawn and dusk and star-swept nights.
Now shall I fill my heart with quiet music,
Song of the wind across the pine-clad hill,
Song of the rain and, fairer than all music,
Call of the thrush when twilight woods are still.
So shall the days to come be filled with beauty,
Bright with the promise caught from eastern skies;
So shall I see the stars when night is darkest,
Still hear the thrush’s song when music dies.’
~ Medora C. Addison, “The Days to Come,”
in Dreams and A Sword (Yale University Press, 1922).
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Harnessing and Nurturing the Power of Good in the Year of COVID
Photo: Financial Times
‘Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on
Our troubles will be out of sight.’
'Hope is the one good god remaining.'- The 6th century BC Greek poet, Theognis of Megara
‘It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again.’
‘We are all a living tapestry...Living threads...Being Sewn together…’
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Boris Johnson continues the racist virus spawned by Enoch Powell
Brexit: The Path to Tyranny and the loss of Moral and Spiritual Compass
“It is my considered opinion that for Britain and Europe, and for liberal democracy across the entire world as a whole, Britain’s departure from the European Union in the time of Donald Trump, and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States in an era when the US is heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism, is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none.”- John le Carré, Agent Running in the Field
A portrait of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and late Tory politician Enoch Powell. (illustration by Mohamad Elaasar) via Middle East Eye
‘Both told monstrous lies: not the usual dishonesties of politics, but lies that break people’s lives. Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech had a title adapted from a line from Virgil, but that didn’t make it classy…’
‘The name of Enoch Powell provokes consternation in many on both the left and right of British politics. But the sometime Conservative was a powerful influence on Tory Euroscepticism – probably greater than most would want to acknowledge. His views on Europe chime with recurring themes in the referendum campaign.’- How Enoch Powell helped to shape modern Tory Euroscepticism
‘KARL Marx argued that history always repeats itself, firstly as tragedy then second time around as farce. Marx was talking about how Napoleon Bonaparte was followed by his mediocre and dandyish nephew, Louis. However, there is a case to be made for a similar comparison between Enoch Powell and Boris Johnson.’- George Kerevan
‘...This makes Johnson the direct political descendent of Powell, and the British answer to US President Donald Trump…’- Peter Oborne
More on these a bit later. For now lest we forget:
Brexit: The Path to Tyranny and the loss of Moral and Spiritual Compass
EU Referendum: An Open Letter to British people - One man's view of Britain and the British
BREXIT: When England Betrayed Churchill
So, They Got Their Brexit Done!
Britain today and the Bankruptcy of Ideas, Vision and Values-less Education
And now a reflection on Boris, the spit image of Enoch!
Photo: Conservative Glossary
How did Enoch Powell, a man with no shame, come to haunt our times?*
The late politician specialised in sowing division and indulged in national fantasies
‘The ghost of Enoch Powell hangs over Britain this weekend, with a smile on its thin lips. If you are too young to remember him, Boris Johnson offers a recrudescence. Powell was a genuine classical scholar. Cambridge awarded him a starred double first in Latin and Ancient Greek in 1933. Johnson was so-so academically. His failure to achieve a first at Oxford enraged him. But, like Powell, he learned the value of dropping a Latin phrase in a class-ridden country, which still thinks a classical education is a sign of superior intelligence.
Both told monstrous lies: not the usual dishonesties of politics, but lies that break people’s lives. Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech had a title adapted from a line from Virgil, but that didn’t make it classy. He unleashed hatred and violence against black and Asian immigrants and their children in 1968 by using the story of an old white woman in Wolverhampton. She had lost her husband and sons in the war and her reward was to be intimidated by “Negros”. Her “windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist,’ they chant.”
It was an urban myth. Powell could not identify the woman. Clem Jones, the editor of the Wolverhampton Express & Star, sent reporters out, and they returned without a story. Jones, who was still remembered with respect when I was a reporter in the West Midlands, was so angry he ended his friendship with Powell.
No apology followed. Just the assertion that it wasn’t racist to talk about immigration which has echoed down the decades, as if what you said and how you talked did not matter. No apology will come from the lips of another politician who was comfortable with the term “piccaninnies”. Johnson belatedly apologised for his use of the word “piccaninnies” but that has been the limit of his contrition. Brexit would lead to more money for scientists, the arts, the NHS, farmers, Britain’s poor regions and all working people. “There is no plan for no deal, because we’re going to get a great deal,” he said in 2017. People who believed him then will be losing their jobs in 2021 because, as of today, the options are no deal or an abysmal deal.
Our national reckoning must include a reckoning with Powell. Three policies he promoted have descended on Britain simultaneously. Powell was a Thatcherite before Thatcherism, advocating privatisation and unashamed capitalism so vigorously that Friedrich Hayek said in 1965: “All our hopes in England now rest on Enoch Powell.” Today his successors say we can expect to see an unashamed Britannia unchained from the bureaucracy of the EU. Powell’s attacks on immigrants saw him expelled from the Tory frontbench in 1968. A half century on, we have a Conservative government that won the Brexit referendum with Powellite lies about tens of millions of Turks heading our way if we stayed in the EU.
Powell had a magical belief in sovereignty that is everywhere on the right today. Jobs, living standards, power and influence must be sacrificed on the altar of this elusive god. Powell was adamant that rejecting Europe was a test of our “will and the power to remain a nation”. In 1997, towards the end of his life, Powell watched the Tories shift from being a pro- to an anti-European party and applauded its recognition that the EU was “a means of prejudicing our own nationhood”.
Paul Corthorn, Powell’s biographer, believes the “age of Brexit is the age of Powell” and I wish I could demur. For a politician, inexplicably famed for the banal observation that “all political careers end in failure”, Powell is enjoying a posthumous victory.
It remains a disaster, and not only for those who need a prosperous country to support them. The right cannot have all it wants. Indeed, its leaders are so incompetent and its once serious thinkers so lost in fantasy, it may end up with nothing. The nation it claims to love is Britain, not England. The Conservative party is a unionist party. Powell was such a firm believer in protecting Britain’s integrity that he left the Tories in 1974 to become the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down.
The right does not realise the EU was holding Britain together. Johnson is not only taking us out of the world’s richest single market, he is putting a border between Northern Ireland and the residual UK. As David Allen Green of the Financial Times bitingly put it, after losing the single market, the “United Kingdom has actually ended up with a free trade area smaller than the United Kingdom”. Northern Ireland’s future lies in the European market it shares with the Republic. The very people who said the unity of the UK was their guiding principle are pushing it away.
Scotland’s future appeared settled when it voted against independence. But the vote was to remain in a UK that was part of the EU. Nationalists lost in 2014, in part because an independent Scotland would have been outside the EU. Now Brexit has torn up the deal between the nations, support for independence is at record highs.
Thatcherism and Brexit are as incompatible as unionism and Brexit. Ever since 2016, there has been an obvious tension between the leaders of the Brexit movement, who wanted to let capitalism rip, and the Conservatives’ working-class supporters who wanted greater protections.
Less noticed is the vast increase in bureaucracy leaving the single market will bring. From the 19th century on, its proponents admired free trade because it removed the influence of unproductive bureaucrats. The end of free trade with Europe is leading to an explosion in border officers, regulators of everything from medicines to aviation, emergency planners, negotiators and bureaucrats of all varieties, citing rules and handing out compliance notices in a country so far from Powell’s dream of unashamed capitalism it is barely recognisable.
All political careers end in failure, and nothing will illustrate the failure of Enoch Powell’s career better than his pyrrhic victory from beyond the grave.'
- Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist. Read the original article HERE
……
And finally, I did my best to show Boris how he may repent and become a good man.
But, sadly, it is true, leopards are leopards and will never change their spots!
Dear Mr. Johnson, your Covid-19 survival must become a force for good
- Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future
- BREXIT: When England Betrayed Churchill
- King Cnut, Churchill and Brexit
- The Folly and Ignorance of Brexit to Grasp the TRUTH: EU has always been a Peace Project First and Foremost
- My poem of the Month: December- The End and the New Beginning with Hope and Optimism